MELBOURNE FESTIVAL: Two Jews Walk Into A Theatre

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL 2017
Two Jews Walk Into A Theatre
Brian Lipson and Gideon Obarzanek
19 October 2017
Beckett Theatre
to 22 October
www.festival.melbourne/2017

Brian Lipson and Gideon Obarzane. Photo by Sarah Walker

Laurence Lipson and Zenek Obarzanek never met but their sons, actor Brian Lipson and dancer/choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, have worked together making theatre in Melbourne. Last year the fathers met for the first time waiting in the Arts House foyer to see a show their sons had made about the fictional meeting of their fathers. This Melbourne Festival, they are meeting again for the first time on the too-high foyer chairs at the Coopers Malthouse.

Brian's now in his 60s and Gideon's in his 50s. As middle age is the time when you're horrified or thrilled to see more of a parent in yourself than you ever imagined, what better time to become their fathers on stage.

With conversations that are partly improvised, it's a satire about the theatre they have made together, an examination of Australian Jewish identity and a reflection on the father-son relationship.

Children mostly know their parents in a way that no one else can, and this knowledge is mostly formed from interactions and behaviours that no one else sees. The adult children create loving characters in their fathers – even when they are angry and stubborn – but it's their sharing of the moments they never forgot as children that shows the heart of the work.

MELBOURNE FESTIVAL: Lady Eats Apple

Melbourne Festival
Lady Eats Apple
Back to Back Theatre
8 October 2016
Hamer Hall
to 13 October
www.festival.melbourne

Lady Eats Apple. Melbourne Festival. Photo by Jeff Busby

I’m still thinking about Back to Back Theatre’s Lady Meets Apple. I want to talk about it, but want to hold it safe and close so that its meaning stays between the performers and me.

The Melbourne Festival world premiere – it’s heading around the world – is a much-anticipated, and well-funded, work by the Geelong-based company that continue to question how the world perceives intellectual disability and theatre.

Following from the sold-out international acclaim of Ganesh Versus the Third Reich (one of the best things I’ve seen), this work started its development with ensemble member Simon Laherty saying he wanted to make a tragedy. The six-member ensemble are the only full-time paid ensemble in Victoria

This tragedy starts with a loved creation myth and the downfall of those who were there.

In an inflated taut black cavern-cum-womb in a disconcerting space somewhere in Hamer Hall, two on-stage roadies in black t-shirts demand more of the dark empty world that they control.

As their god status becomes clear, the pissed-off and insecure young god (Scott Price) –”What if god is one of us?” – thinks that the older and more frustrated god (Brian Lipson) – “Who is like god?” – treats him like a “dumb shit” and declares his one true status by creating animals.  The creatures are named by the first man (Mark Deans) and woman (Sarah Mainwaring), who ask their god for more boundaries than merely knowing that they shouldn’t eat an apple.

When the older god collapses, the blackness disappears – there’s nothing like an audience gasping together – and time begins.

Apparently the next section is 20 minutes, but it could be moments or an eternity as the world becomes white and breathes and move as shapes appear and the music and sounds in our headphones – the whole show is heard through headphones – offer few clues. It’s hard to see if the faraway shadows are human. They look like Ewoks or monks and I think I saw a man carry a long and heavy burden on his shoulder.

Lady Eats Apple. Back to Back Theatre. Photo by Jeff Busby

It ends as the whiteness falls and the audience is faced with the enormity of the orange velvet, three-level emptiness of the concert hall. The secrets are revealed; what was so mysterious and unseeable is clear. And cleaners (Deans, Laherty, Mainwaring, Price and Romany Latham) – the people we never see when we sit in that theatre – fight about their right to take a juicy bite of all that’s on the forbidden but reachable tree.

Its dramaturgy is complex but so gentle that its truth acts more on an unconscious level and doesn’t feel clear until it circles back to its beginning and the extraordinary manifests out of the ordinary.

Under Bruce Gladwin’s direction, Lady Eats Apple confronts audiences with their own perceptions humanity and never allows a moment of ease or complicity as their audience are left to create their own meaning or struggle to understand.


This was on AussieTheatre.com.

Finishing this weekend: The Witches and Photographs of A

The Witches
Malthouse Theatre
Last show tonight
malthousetheatre.com.au

Roald Dahl's children's stories are dark and naughty and let children get into all sorts of trouble without bothersome grown ups ruining the fun or trying to help. The Witches is about what happens when a group of children-hating witches meet at a hotel and come across an orphaned boy.

Having missed chunk of the beginning (I should have known there is no right turn onto Sturt Street from Kings Way during peak hour), I didn't review but I loved what I saw.

Guy Edmonds plays everyone in this stage version of the story, which is based on a play by David Wood. His instant transformations from horrible hag to squeaky fast mouse are magic. There's little on the stage except the performer and the imagination of his audience – it's pretty close to the experience of reading – and together they create a show that's more spectacular, far scarier and more loving than anything made from special effects.

Here's what Keith Gow thought after seeing it earlier this week.

NEON
Photographs of A
Antechamber and Daniel Keene
Last show tomorrow
mtc.com.au

Until this show, I didn't know anything about 15-year-old Louise Augustine Gleizes. Known as "A", she was a celebrity hysteric in Paris in the late 1870s whose hysterias were photographed and the young woman was exhibited by her doctor, the influential neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Photographs of A by Daniel Keene explores the young woman's illness and experiences in the Salpetriere sanitarium from inside A's head.

If only the public display of ill and sexually traumatised young women didn't feel so familiar.

Sixty-something Helen Morse is Augustine and, even though Ben Grant and Anouk Gleeson-Mead appear on stage with her, the script is nearly all hers. Her performance is as beautiful as it is disturbing.

Having seen the photos (they are in the free program), we know A was as gorgeous as any teenage girl is and the key to this work is hearing the teenage voice – one that's still full of hope and doesn't understand the consequences of her experiences – come from an old, ugly and near broken woman. The power of Keene's script comes from what's unspoken.

However the production, directed and designed by Brian Lipson, is so aware of its theatricality that it never escapes the falseness of being in a theatre and feels so obvious that there's little surprise or space for unexpected wonder. When the design starts with rows of tea-light candles, the expectation of their lighting and snuffing takes away from the beauty of the candlelight.

The NEON festival is about the new and the daring. Photographs of A is a lovely piece that's worth seeing for Morse, but it feels out of place in NEON.

Review: night maybe

night maybe
Stuck Pigs Squealing, Theatre Works
17 August 2013
Theatre Works
to 1 September
theatreworks.org.au

There's no maybe about it; night maybe is a must. Stuck Pig's Squealing are consistently a bit awesome and this new work by writer Kit Brookman is as beautiful as it is disturbing and leaves its audience happily lost somewhere between unknown and certain.

On a dark night, Sasha and her brother Tom are in park. She has torches and Nutella sandwiches, but he still abandons her. As she heads into the darkness where others are hiding, each new encounter brings her dangerously closer to safety.

Like in his recent work Heaven, Brookman writes about young adults without forcing the judgment, logic or fear of adults-who-know-better onto them. His night world hides the unknown, embraces the supernatural, but is never clear what, if anything, is real.

Sarah Ogden, Tom Conroy, Marcus McKenzie and Brian Lipson perform like it was written for them. They let each character keep their truths to themselves and never share what they saw in the darkness. This deepens the mystery with every moment and brings us closer to characters who we want to be safe, but still want them to stay in dark until they let us in on the truth.

And all is made more astonishing with the exquisite design by Mel Page (set and costume), Richard Vabre (lighting) and James Brown (sound). From its black and foggy opening, the sight of real grass and trees offers hope of a picnic-perfect conclusion in the sun, but it gets darker and colder as the light creeps into the menacing shadows.

Director Luke Mullins brings all together in a work that's impossible to look away from and difficult to stop thinking about.. By holding back, it never screams its meaning and whatever you walk away with believing is right for you. Just don't miss it.

Photo by Sarah Walker

This was on AussieTheatre.com

Review: Tribes

Tribes
Melbourne Theatre Company
9 February 2012
Sumner Theatre
to 14 March

Heartfelt and honest performances from a wonderful cast are reason enough to see the MTC's Tribes.

With three extravert, attention-seeking adult children living with their over-achieving parents, there's rarely a quiet moment in this house. Dad (Brian Lipson) is a writer and a never-wrong academic, Mum (Sarah Peirse) is trying to write a detective novel, daughter (Julia Grace) is trying to be an opera singer and son 1 (David Paterson) is working on a thesis. It'd be a bohemian middle class paradise, if it weren't for the constant arguing. The only one who misses out on a daily tiff is son 2, Billy, (Luke Watts), who's deaf.

When Billy meets Sylvia (Alison Bell), his view of his family and his place in our hearing-centric society changes. Sylvia has deaf parents and was brought up with Sign as her first language. She works for a deaf events company and is gradually losing her hearing and her connection to the non-deaf world. As Billy learns Sign and meets a community he'd avoid in an attempt to be normal, he sees how much he has missed and how much his deafness is seen as the centre of his personality.

The dynamic and internal-rules of family life are captured perfectly and it's an awkward joy to watch them argue over the likes of orange juice or if it's Wagner or Terry Pratchett. Lipson and Peirse are especially irresistible as a couple who show their deep love through fighting, and Bell brings the inner hell and dilemma of her character into every moment of Sylvia's smiling politeness.

British writer Nina Raine's script soars when we're caught in the emotions and dilemmas of these complex people, but, as Billy and Sylvia force change, the metaphorical and literal deafness begins to dominate and the author's voice butts in to lecture.

Sign is as complex as any other language, the Deaf community is as hierarchical and inbred as the thearte community and society generally isn't brilliant at dealing with people with different abilities. While loving that often un-spoken issues are the base of a story, but they'd be as clear without the rhetoric and ongoing metaphors, which would let the story and its characters more free to grab us by our hearts.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Photo by Jeff Busby

Review: A Golem Story

A Golem Story
Malthouse Theatre
17 June 2011
Merlyn Theatre
www.malthousetheatre.com.au

I don't want a year without a new play by Lally Katz. Until now, her addictive black writing has usually left me in tears of laughter, but she has bounded into new ground with A Golem Story: an exquisite exploration about the place of God and the sacred in our lives.

In Prague in 1580, Ahava (Yael Stone) wakes up in a Synagogue with a disjointed memory of her dead husband and believes his Dybbuk (spirit) has passed into her. The Rabbi  (Katz favourite, Brian Lipson) invites her to stay, but his student Amos (Dan Speilman) fears her, especially when the Rabbi asks her to help make a Golem that can protect the local Jews and stop local children from being killed.  Meanwhile, the Christian guard (Greg Stone) will go to any length to prove that the blood of Christ is enough for him, but his Emperor (Mark Jones) is willing to share an apple with Jew.

Drawing on Jewish culture and with live music led by Cantor Michel Laloum, director Michael Kantor reveals his heart and soul in this work. I've often felt distanced by Kantor's work, where I could see the intent and the creativity, but never felt for the world or the characters. God sits in the heart of this world. Each character sees him/her/it as something different, but each yearns for the deep comfort that sacred beliefs bring. It's not a Jew versus Christian tale, but it uses these two great faiths to let us examine where we'd be if the space filled by what we hold scared became empty.

The outstanding cast clearly draw on their own beliefs to bring the contractions of fear and faith, secular and sacred, and God and human to each character, who are all struggling to make decisions that will bring God closer to their lives.

Designers Anna Cordingley (costume and set) and Paul Jackson (lighting) create this world with a combination of the warm darkness of 16th century Prague and the coldness of clean contemporary light. I've found Cordingley's designs distracting in the past, but her distinct sense of detail and remarkable aesthetic support every element of the script and I can't imagine one without the other. Jackson's use of burning candles and electric light is stunning and his light-only Golem evokes a fascinating contradiction of fear and love. I know I say it every time, but there isn't a lighting designer in this town who comes near to Jackson.

A Golem Story retains Katz's gorgeously unique voice, but it doesn't rely on humour to create emotion. By losing the comfortable buffer of laughs, her characters are left more emotionally vulnerable and we have no choice but to feel with them. This is beautiful, emotive writing and evidence that this wonderful writer is going to be one of our unforgettable playwrights.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.

Review: Song of the Bleeding Throat

Song of the Bleeding Throat
The Eleventh Hour
28 January 2011
The Eleventh Hour Theatre
to 12 February
www.theeleventhhour.com.au

David Tredinnick (writer), Brian Lipson (director) and Neil Pigot (actor) are some of my favourite Melbourne theatre creators. I'm adding actors Ann Browning, Richard Bligh and James Saunders to the list as their performances in Song of the Bleeding Throat were remarkable, but I have no idea what this show is trying to say.

In his program notes Lipson says that when he first read the play he could "barely comprehend it" and eventually understood that it was written to be performed. As someone watching it performed, I could barely comprehend it and wouldn't mind a read so I might begin to understand it.

The tsunami of text, which includes quotes from Marx (Karl) to Barnum, is so overwhelming that it  becomes noise. The creators familiarity and understanding of it is clear, but as an audience we are coming to it for the first time and it's a struggle to keep up.

The opening scenes mimimally replicate Tait's Chealsea Interior painting of Thomas and Jane Carlyle with their dog, and with Pigot as the most delightfully dry Absurd-like stage manager of sorts, a mood of comic anticipation is set. There are wonderfully original and funny moments throughout, but its completeness drowns in the words – even with the welcome catch up space of drugs and farts.

The second half turns literally turns the theatre around and Pigot is Abraham Lincoln, Bligh is Walt Whitman, Saunders is John Wilkes Booth and Browning is the statue of Liberty. Again, the performances are superb, the staging and design are immaculate and the final "I sing the body electric" moment (the Fame, not the Whitman version) made my heart glow with ironic nostalgic joy, but I still had no idea what it was about or who it was talking to and was glad that it was over.

For all it's exquisite technique, intelligence and super well-read cleverness that rightly deserves to be admired (and maybe envied), this is the kind of theatre that makes you feel like an uneducated twat if you don't understand it. It reminded me of going to a Walt Whitman lecture in 1987 from a professor determined to show how much he knew and how little smart arse undergrads knew. I only chose American Lit because Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was on the reading list ... although part of me must have listened because I recognised Whitman quoting Whitman and had a burst of over-educated smugness. But I had to Google Tait and the Carlyles.

This review appears on AussieTheatre.com

Apocalypse Bear Trilogy

MIAF 2009
Apocalypse Bear Trilogy
MTC and Melbourne International Arts Festival
Friday 9 October 2009
The MTC Theatre, Lawler Studio

If there is any reason why open access festivals, like the Fringe, and independent companies and venues need as much support as we can muster, it is the Apocalypse Bear Trilogy.

Stuck Pigs Squealing have become one of independent Melbourne’s favourite companies and have worked to be presentd by our biggest professional company and earn their much-deserved place in our International Arts Festival.

Lally Katz’s Apocalypse Bear emerged from the woods as a commission for White Whale’s 2007 Melburnalia. The short piece started as a tale about living in far Kew and the congenial and terrifying bear instantly became one of my favourite bears (alongside Pooh, Paddington, the sneezing baby panda on YouTube and friends of mine who drink at the Laird).

Katz is also on my list of bloody-amazing-writers-who-every-other-writer-needs-to-see. The trilogy (The Fag of Zagreb, Back to the Cafeteria and At Last) is about instincts and emotion and the dark, dangerous woods that are as close as one tram stop away, and is so well written that you can’t see the skill for the words. Katz knows that people never say what they mean and creates world of subtext so powerful and raw that a conversation about putting the bins out is as menacing and moving as theatre can be.

It’s not just the writing, the design team of Mel Page (set and costume), Richard Vabre (lighting) and Jethro Woodward (sound) bring this script into the theatre and with co-directors (and performers) Luke Mullins and Brian Lipson, they build tension so gently that we’re only aware of it when it’s released and we realise we’ve been holding our breath.

Mullins and Katherine Tonkin (who were astonishing in SPS’s The Eisteddfod) grasp Katz’s writing like it comes from their hearts. It would be so easy to miss the darkness or the hope that is hidden in Lally’s strange world, but they capture every nuance and never let Sonia or Jeremy act like anything isn’t exactly how it should be. And, for all the wonderful characters Lipson has brought us, he was born to be The Apocalypse Bear.

Reviewing is nothing but subjective opinion, but in mine, The Apocalypse Bear Trilogy is best piece of theatre I’ve seen this year.

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.


More adventures of The Apocalypse Bear:
Episode # 1 and Episode # 2.

Grace

Grace
Melbourne Theatre Company
7 January 2009
Fairfax Studio, the Arts Centre

MTC’s 2009 season starts with Grace, a comprehensive debate about religion, belief, faith and love. It’s another play about middle aged academics in crisis, but no one can ever say that this company don’t target their core audience.

Originally performed as On Religion, Grace was developed in the UK by Mick Gordon’s company On Theatre. Gordon calls his works ‘theatre essays’. Each is a group-devised piece exploring a specific issue through a dramatic narrative, with works including On Death, On Ego and On Emotion. He co-wrote On Religion with English Philosopher A C Grayling.

Grayling is not a believer and his views sit firmly in protagonist Grace. Gordon’s views are more encompassing with each member of Grace’s family having specific and changing perspectives about religion. Questions arise when Grace’s son plans to become an Anglican priest and everyone is forced to confront their core beliefs when tragedy strikes.

Gordon says, “The theatre demands argument and balance. It’s no good at didacticism. In my experience, an audience will just not accept it.” The script reflects this with a fascinating range of well researched, contemporary and authentic arguments. And this is where the problem sits.

It’s a very well written work, but it feels too much like a philosophy student’s honours thesis. You certainly leave the theatre discussing and questioning the arguments put forward, but not talking about the characters and the world just seen. There was chat about what Noni (Hazlehurst) did and what Brian (Lipson) said rather than what Grace and Tom went though. I spent the rest of the evening discussing whether a practicing Anglican can reject a literal belief in Jesus or the concept of Christ. It’s great coffee talk, but it was academic; it wasn’t an emotional discussion about what I would do in a similar situation or dilemma.

It felt like the story was forced upon the ideas and the characters were developed from arguments and points of view. This may well be the aim of Gordon’s work, but it left his characters lacking in complexity and making decisions that were consistent with the argument, rather than the character.

Nonetheless, director Marion Potts breaks down most of the rhetoric and tells the story with warmth and passion. The most moving moments occurred when there was no dialogue and the characters were able to show us what they were really feeling. Hazlehurst is especially stunning when she reacts to a very long monologue at a grave side.

The casting is perfect. Hazlehurst and Lipson are joined by Grant Cartwright and Leah Vandenberg and each brings a complexity and emotional life to their character that isn’t evident in the writing.

Adam Gardnir is on his way to being one of the must have designers in the country and Grace is his first main stage design for the MTC. The design initially seems quite obvious and practical, but as the story unfolds, it shows its suggestiveness, and ultimately reveals its symbolism and complexity.

Grace is well worth seeing for the calibre of the creative team. Its writing is sure to encourage many discussions, but would be so much more powerful if it could break free from its own restraints and create a world not so strictly governed by text book debate.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com.